When it comes to taking all manner of notes and using them to get work done, a note-taking app that syncs across many devices is indispensable. Evernote has long been a leader in this space, though the company has taken its fair share of criticism in recent years for adding excessive features without polishing core ones, and most recently, changing its pricing and tiers of service. The new plans gut the value proposition of the free service and hike the price on power users. In terms of functionality, Evernote remains one of the best note-taking and syncing services, which is the reason it remains PCMag's Editors' Choice despite these complaints (and despite a half-star drop in its rating). You can bend it to your will and use it for practically anything, from recording and sharing meetings, to searching for text inside PDFs, to keeping a daily diary. But you have to pay for the highest tier of service to get all those features. At $69.99 a year, that takes serious consideration.

Longtime users of Evernote, myself included, need to weigh the pros and cons of switching to a new service seriously before ditching Evernote for another tool, seeing as the transition can be a bear. But those in the market for the first time will do well to instead consider Microsoft OneNote, a part of Editors' Choice cloud storage and syncing service OneDrive, which is an Editors' Choice. If you don't know what you're missing because you've never used Evernote, OneDrive's free version is definitely a solid option.

Plans and PricingEvernote has apps for just about every platform on the market: Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone, Windows touch devices, Windows desktops, Macs, and the Web. Apps for all of these platforms are free to download, and each requires an account to use.

A free account will let you use Evernote locally on only two devices, plus in any browser. It's by far the biggest limitation of using the free account, and it seems all the more severe for longtime users, give that Evernote historically always gave free members unfettered access across all their devices. This change took effect for all new users in late June of 2016. The company says that existing users may or may not see their rates change; the service plans to give users "some time to adjust to adjust before the changes take place" and will inform them via email of any changes.

Free account holders also get less storage space per month. Evernote handles storage space by giving its users a per-month limit for new uploads that resets at the start of each month. Theoretically, all users have unlimited storage because you get more every month in perpetuity. In practice, however, free users get very little, just 60MB per month. If you don't use the full 60MB, the remaining allowance does not roll over into next month. Also, the biggest file you can upload to a free account is 25MB.

Free users do get some good features, though, including the ability to search any text found in images. Imagine taking a photo of a whiteboard or a page of a book and being able to search for the words on it. It's superb. Free users can't search for text in any PDFs that are attached to notes, however. One new perk for free users as of 2016 is that they can add an optional passcode lock on their Evernote apps on mobile devices.

Paid accounts come in three tiers of service: Plus, Premium, and Business. PCMag reviewed Evernote Business separately. It starts at $12 per user per month and adds admin powers and a few team features not found in the other editions. See the link for complete coverage.

Plus is the middle tier of service, and at $34.99 per year or $3.99 per month, it's okay. But it feels gutted compared to what Evernote used to offer for a similar price. For context, the Plus level used to cost $10 less a year ago, and two years ago, it didn't even exist, when Premium was the only paid option. Prior to 2015, Evernote only offered the Premium account, and it cost $45 per year or $5 per month and included 4GB of upload space per month. If existing users had been grandfathered into the new service at their previous fees, there would have been much less balking at the price hike.

Plus users get 1GB of storage space each month for new uploads, but they can only upload files with a max size of 50MB. They can use as many instances of the app as they want with no syncing limitations. Another big benefit is the ability to save notes offline so that you can edit them when you don't have Internet. The changes sync the next time you connect. Plus users also have the ability to forward emails into Evernote, and they get customer support via email.

Premium users now have to pay $69.99 per year or $7.99 per month to get the whole shebang. The price was formerly $45 per year, so it's a significant increase. A Premium account supports 10GB of new uploads per month, and there's a max file size of 200MB. In addition to all the features included with Plus, Premium members also get the ability to search for text in PDFs and Microsoft Office documents, too. Premium users can also browse the history of any note, scan and digitize business cards, and turn an Evernote note into a presentation.

The Evernote WayEvernote is one of those applications that you either get or struggle to understand. It's so flexible and open that when you first start using it, you can easily get blank-page syndrome. On the company's blog, you can find tips and use cases about Evernote, which can help you understand the service's value.

In brief, Evernote is a place to record and save all your thoughts, notes, photos—whatever you upload—in the cloud so that you can get to all of it from your computer, smartphone, tablet, or anywhere you have an Internet connection and a browser.

An excellent search tool lets you find anything you've uploaded to your account. Geo-tags, manually added tags, notebooks, and stacks of notebooks for organizing notes (similar to folders and parent folders) give you more ways to keep a handle on all your notes, no matter how organized or disorganized you are.

Evernote, OneNote, and Google Keep are similar in their core functionality, although Evernote has more features and a few unique ones. For example, Evernote adds geo-tags to your notes when you have location services enabled, which is a great help to business travelers who might remember where they were when they took a note but don't remember anything about the content. Premium and Business users can also enable a unique feature called Context Sources that pulls up related notes based on keywords. It will also find online news and feature articles from sites such as the Wall Street Journal, that might be relevant.

Evernote also has an in-app chat box called Work Chat. It lets you instant-message collaborators in real time about shared notes. It's handy if you use Evernote collaboratively.

Google Keep, on the other hand, is much messier. It doesn't offer any way to organize notes and notebooks neatly. You can label notes (similar to tags in Evernote), but any sense of organization goes out the window with Google Keep. OneNote has notebooks and Sections at least, but its Web app is very slow to load them, which could bring productivity to a crawl.

The Evernote Web app has a fairly minimal design, even more so than the desktop apps. A column of icons appears at the left to let you quickly start a new note, search, start a Work Chat, reach your shortcuts, view all notes, view all notebooks, and see your tags.

I'm a big fan of the full-screen option, which mimics distraction-free text editors. You can focus on your work rather than getting caught up in formatting.

Evernote builds each of its apps separately, with teams dedicated to different platforms. As a result, each app has a unique look and interactions that are specific to the platform at hand. This also means that features sometimes appear in one version of Evernote but not in others. For example, the search function in the Web app doesn't work in real time, relying instead on you hitting the Enter key before finding applicable notes. In other Evernote apps, results appear as you type.

Two Premium-only features missing from the browser-based version of Evernote are Context Sources and PDF annotation. If you want to annotate, crop, and rotate PDFs and image files uploaded to Evernote, you have to do it from the desktop apps.

There are many settings you can only manage from the Web, although that's a common issue with apps that have both desktop and Web apps.

An Ever-Changing Value PropositionRecent changes notwithstanding, Evernote remains one of the best note-taking and syncing services there is in terms of features and functionality. It's still an eminently worthy Editors' Choice productivity tool.

Changes to the paid plans, including stiff price hikes, have left many members questioning their allegiance to the service, though. It remains to be seen if new users will be discouraged from signing up at the higher price points. Certainly, they'll be much less impressed if they decide to take the service for a ride with the now downgraded free account.

Evernote power users who are considering making the switch to OneNote or Google Keep may find those services come up short, however. Paying to keep a $69.99-per-year Premium account will be worth it for many people who have come to rely on Evernote. But more casual note-takers, and especially those who are new to note-taking apps in general, might do well to try OneNote instead.

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Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital formats. She is also the creator and author of ProductivityReport.org.
Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for...
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